Is Spotify Killing the Top 40? | Hacker News Reader

Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

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136 pointsdaegloe259 comments

I hope so. Top 40 lists are constructed not observed. They seem to have no relationship to what music is favored by listeners, just what is being pushed on pop radio. A self satisfying loop.

It is astonishing when you realize it. Since the MCM times, we’ve transferred music bands from sound to image, and we noticed the commercial drums (and repetition on radios in particular) produced linear return in investment, and music characteristics hadn’t much to do with it. To the point that today, any music will do. It’s much easier for the labels, since they can pimp anyone among the 1-10% of the population who can sing, and therefore they can choose people on character and ethnicity. Studies on thousands of pieces showed that melodies recouped more and more, the chorus started earlier in the song, songs got shorter, and instrument-based tricks reduced. Meanwhile loudness increased (screams and whisper are at the same volume) to make it fitter for bad-quality players (radio, speakers etc.)

I think you’re right and I’d argue that American Idol proves that there is a surplus of talent for labels to choose from, allowing them to be picky in regards to secondary requirements (ethnicity, backstory, work ethic).

The difference being that American Idol contestants are often actually quite artistically good - they only managed to get where they are because of skill and looks and luck, instead of just the latter two. (This isn't universal; it's often the case they pick someone up who is actually pretty awful but is interesting for the whole mechanics of the show, either being very attractive or standing out in some other way... but it still holds that the show has actually managed to scout real talent on the whole - just look at how many of the people who didn't win managed to snag successful music careers afterwards.)

But that's beside the point here. My biggest peeve is that there are plenty of "Top 40" "artists" that can barely hold a note. And it's been that way since the 90s, thanks to the magic of Auto-Tune. Anyone with a marketing budget and access to an industry insider who can make the right moves can just start dropping albums and buying hit slots.

What's changed is that now, anyone with a YouTube or Twitch channel can just start publishing music. Create a Soundcloud and you can get rotation in any one of a dozen DJs podcasts. TuneCore will put your stuff in the Music Stores. Spotify and Pandora are a little harder to break into, but not much. Setup a Twitter account and talk directly to your fans without needing a publicist.

A whole industry's worth of Kingmakers have been turned into online services, and that's really changing the landscape of the industry.

I think it's going to be better for it in the long run. I know it's hard for bands to make ends meet off album sales now, but on the other hand it doesn't cost 100k to produce and distribute anymore. Some people don't even have to spend a dime, it can be home produced and still have an audience.

I think a lot more of them can hold a tune than you give them credit for, it's just that pitch adjustment in the studio is stretching them beyond their natural vocal range, so when they try to reproduce it live, quality suffers. Unless you're specifically talking about artists like T-Pain, but their whole thing is that autotune is their vocal instrument.

That was definitely the way he marketed himself. He knew exactly what he was doing and is a great example of marketing vs music. T-Pain knows music, and is a fantastic musician, check out his NPR gig with just a keyboardist and his natural voice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc

You say “music characteristics hadn’t much to do with it” but then you list a number of specific characteristics that make music more likely to work on radio. That suggests the opposite of “any music will do”. Only music with very specific qualities will do.

Or maybe you just meant to say you don’t like pop?

It means pop has turned into a social psychology experiment designed to maximise the return invested in production, and not an individually expressive art form.

The obvious end point will be AI-generated muzak which tweaks all the right receptors but is devoid of any disturbingly non-optimal fleshy surprise.

"has" should be "is" right. Most mainstream music has been, from what I understand for a few centuries, a combination of artists expressing themselves while trying to cater to an audience. Otherwise it's an art or a hobby. I don't know any "music as a (pure) art" and I guess with me most causal listeners.

Commercial art in general has been that way for centuries. Doesn't mean that it's intrinsically devoid of quality. Many of the classical masterpieces were made to order to cater to the fancy of some rich patron.

Many? Virtually _all_, either for a rich individual or the church. An artist just making a thing, and seeing if people like it, is a pretty new invention. Probably a big part of why post-19th century art is so much more interesting and diverse; Western art pre-19th century was largely about technical competence in whatever the current fashionable style was.

> An artist just making a thing, and seeing if people like it

I sincerely doubt if that's how it works even nowadays. You need to be discovered by a well-connected and well-heeled patron who thinks what you do can be marketed with just a few tweaks. Very seldom does the artist become the patron of their own work is my guess. Banksy might be one of the few exceptions that prove the rule.

I think the difference today is that the normal path is that an artist does a lot of stuff, potentially quite innovative, and is _then_ discovered (or not; see Van Gogh for instance). And at that point, maybe discovered by the market, not a single patron; I believe an artist having a single patron has been rather unusual for at least the last century.

A few hundred years ago, by contrast, artists tended to get into it via, essentially, apprenticeship to another artist, and attempt to get a patron that way. Some artists ended up being technically proficient, but stylistic innovation was very, very slow and minor by comparison to the late 19th century on.

Art has been democratized in recent years. And not just the drawing type of art either: music, videos, 3d modeling, animation, digital print, literature, etc can be produced on a computer. So today, pretty much anyone with a computer can create whatever random idea is spinning in their brains.

You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead simple to do vector art without any drawing ability. GTAV comes with an animation toolkit for making films.

Most people create art for fun or their own pleasure. Tiktok is full of "modern art" in the form of short videos.

> You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead simple to do vector art without any drawing ability.

I'd argue that that's still talent, if the product is any good. You don't need technical expertise, but you still need creativity.

The talent has moved from your actual technique to your message. How many 10-20$ words can you shove into your statement about the art.

She switched out of painting when the someone in class used pain straight from the tube (no mixing) and just made a vagina that was smoking a cigarette but then had some real good fluff backing it up.

She deeply respected the impressionists so it was rough for her. She's happy in her new medium tho.

source: sister with a masters in fine art from a very prestigious university.

Art is subjective. I never found Guernica aesthetically pleasing, so by your standards I could judge it as a bad painting with "some real good fluff backing it up".

Art is always about the message and the emotions it impresses on people, not raw technique. Or do you think that literature is the art of typesetting?

You're still talking about this smoking vagina, how many other pieces from this class do you mention in casual conversation? Clearly if it was meant to be a provoking piece, it worked to a certain extent.

That's why I said "talent." You don't need to play an instrument to make music anymore. You don't need to draw to make digital illustrations. You can get away with a computer, the right software, and your imagination.

Has "pop music" ever been anything other than this? Since the beginning, it has typically been manufactured by producers and songwriters for mass appeal.

Not only that, but it's such a young form of cultural expression that saying it isn't what it used to be is kinda pointless. For thousands of years, we had people singing songs badly in pubs. Maybe someone could afford an instrument.

And then someone invented the wireless and the record player. According to the myth, it quickly reached its optimum time when some fashionable person was in their youth. And it has been degrading ever since.

Now, as for me, I would think all commercial music is worse than all traditional music. If you can talk, you can sing. But here someone in this thread has suggested that perhaps as little as 1% of the population can sing well enough to be autotuned! (This is insane. The proportion of the population who can sing well enough to be autotuned is much closer to 100% than to 90%.)

Someone else might say that commercial music has done quite well, and it keeps doing better. Certainly there's more and more detail added to it.

But the fashionable story is that at some point, probably in the 1960s, music became brilliant, and then all these grubby gen-xers and millennials got their grubby hands on it and turned it all into the most dreary computer driven sounds imaginable.

> And then someone invented the wireless and the record player.

Even before that, you had music halls as popular entertainment (and music hall music was indeed very formulaic, arguably more so than modern pop music).

Saying that before the Top 40 music was reduced to people singing songs badly in pubs and the few who could afford an instrument is a pretty reductive view of musical history.

These 90/100% figures really vary by society. I'd argue that in Ireland, because of the public singing culture, there's more people that can sing passably than in the US. Like learning another language, you're much better off doing it young. I know many fellow Americans who never sing (and are embarrassed to, even though no one has any great expectations) and as a result aren't even passable at it. Relative pitch recognition and vocal pitch reproduction are both nontrivial and better learned young. Fortunately I had some music classes in elementary school that involved singing and I've been singing along to music ever since and thus am OK at it, but many people haven't and aren't.

if the question is whether pop music has ever been anything other than muzak written by AI to tick a number of emotional boxes, I think the answer is pretty obviously yes. That's a ridiculous conclusion. We don't have to dig very deep in the well of incredible pop music...all of Motown, psychedelic rock, etc. was the pop music of the time.

Have you listened to the album Artpop by Lady Gaga? It plays with this idea in an intelligent and musically interesting way. IMHO.

If it were an experiment, it would be more interesting than it is. Experiments can be fun.

Pop as we know it started as a social psychology experiment in the 1960s or earlier. It has now reached the phase where the experiment is over and the results have been published. That is why pop sounds so boring and samey now: the record execs know precisely what works, and all songs must contain certain elements if they are to chart, all while swapping superficial details around to sound "fresh".

The last time there was experimentation going on in pop music was probably the 80s. That's why Michael Jackson's chart-topper "Thriller" sounds so much more layered, complex, and interesting than nearly anything shat out by the chart toppers of today.

But those characteristics are all things that can be mechanically tweaked by a music producer, rather than innovations that make one recording artist more valuable than another.

I think they mean pop music lacks musicality, most of what they listed were to do with sonic tricks that are not really tied to musicality or musicianship. Anyone with even a vague understanding of music can write a song on the same level as a pop song. Every now and then a great musician makes it into the pop scene, and you get interesting chord progressions, melodies and rythms. So it's not the pop style that's bad. But most of the time it's the same four chords, a riskless melody, and four to the floor percussion.

A lot more goes into writing a song than a chord progression. Writing pop hits is an art few people master. That’s why so many hits are written by the same people. See Max Martin for example.

I thought writing a pop song was 10% talent and 90% marketing? Written by the same people because they gatekeep those marketing dollars.

There is massive competition to be a chosen producer or song writer. Being chosen as the one who is marketed is where the competition is. Their positions are earned.

They're earned the same way big movie star roles are earned -- by knowing the right people or sleeping with the producer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y22Dx3jvafY

Complexity in pop music is driven by timbre and instrumentation rather than harmonic or melodic complexity - but timbre and instrumentation are no less valid forms of musical expression and complexity (talk to Ravel or Varese). The desire to judge all music based on the dominant ideas of 16-19th century european classical music seems to exist not to better understand musical expression but instead to let people feel superior to others.

Ooorr... because those measures correspond to something in the experience, that humans have been found to value.

This is obviously wrong, because there are entire classical traditions (centuries or millennia long) from outside of Europe that prioritize musical features beyond traditional western harmony. Any claim that harmonic complexity is fundamental to human experience or uniquely valuable among musical expression is ignorance at best.

All words in my mouth.

I don't think exploration of timbre has been novel for just as long. EDM has been around for decades now which is where a lot of that exploration happens, yet count how many Top40 tracks just use the 808 and call it a day. Modern artists and classic artists all explored timbre, and there are modern artists doing just as much with timbre and musicality.

> pop music lacks musicality, most of what they listed were to do with sonic tricks that are not really tied to musicality or musicianship

This is a paradox, though. You’re saying that one of the most popular types of music “lacks musicality”. The only way that can be true is if you start with a narrow and arbitrary definition of what “musicality” is.

If you examine the history of ideas of what is “real” or “authentic” or “objectively good” in music, who has been a proponent of those ideas through history, and why, you will find is that a lot of it is rooted in white supremacy. The idea is that a certain style of white European music is the only true music, and that other music is only valuable to the extent that it happens to fit within the theoretical frameworks developed around those styles.

I guess what I’m saying is, please watch this excellent video, “Music Theory is Racist” by Adam Neely: https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA

I had watched that a bit earlier, it is excellent. I am definitely aware of the vast expanse of music culture though, I think my use of the word musicality could better be replaced by the word substance.

I think saying western Top40 lacks musicality within the context of western music is a totally fine thing to do though, because it's not that it's something different and good. It's trying to be western music, but it's derivative and shallow interpretations of it. Western music being a broad brush, including many of the subcultures of music contained within somewhere like America.

Top40 is often the crap versions of the good stuff that's out there, cheap versions of the culture that dwells beneath. My main point is that it's popularity is not because of musical excellence regardless of what that excellence is for the given genre/culture, it's manufactured popularity through repetition and distribution. Sometimes they pick good songs to pedal, so I'm not saying Top40 contains zero good music. It's just not a good representation of the state of music culture by any means.

It's hard to talk about music without seeing it through your own experience, because it is a language you share with those who know it. Adam Neely about his Jazz Ambassador tour, said he felt he could connect only tangentially with the Mongolian performers. There was some crossover and they could speak some of the same musical terms, but there was much of their musical language that wasn't immediately compatible. Sort of like a French language speaker sometimes interjecting English words, you can hear them but you can't intuitively know the context, and unless you knew both you couldn't really comment on how well the sentence was executed. But of the genres that end up in Top40, I typically know good music in those genres, so I feel I am able to comment on their quality.

> Anyone with even a vague understanding of music can write a song on the same level as a pop song.

Ok, why don’t you prove it by writing a hit pop song? Come back to this thread when you have your gold record, I’ll wait

The entire point is making the song isn't the hard part. Marketing and managing the artists image is.

I don't even care about the actual gold record or any accolades of any sort. I'd love to hear the gold record level pop song written by someone with only a vague understanding of music. I have 0 respect for most modern pop music, but that's complete nonsense.

As the other commentor said, that's my point. I could write a song that sounds just like a hit pop song, but it wouldn't be a hit because the music that gets popular isn't the best examples of music, it's just the music chosen to be pushed and sold.

You can even see the difference with individual artists in their studio vs live performances.

For some unknown reason I’ve been geeking out on Miley Cyrus lately. Her studio releases have that glossy, overproduced sound of too many cooks in the kitchen. Her live performances on the other hand rely on the power of her vocals and a really tight band that has been together for a stretch now.

Just compare the studio release of Slide Away [1] with what they did on the BBC Live Lounge [2]. Lyrically the song is what it is, but there’s so much more energy and feel (to me anyway) in the latter.

[1] https://youtu.be/rrvFv6j3-sM

[2] https://youtu.be/liRu4mhUF7I

Then of course her Backyard Sessions have been a treat for a while now, but would never grace the airwaves:

https://youtu.be/wOwblaKmyVw

Then there's Katy Perry, whose studio releases sound fine but on stage, she sounds like someone strangling a cat.

Top 40 was born in an era where a large part of the economic equation in music was album sales. The tribal signal helped overcome the activation energy required to shell out the equivalent of a half day’s labor for a teen at the local music store.

Streaming services have killed the album, so the top 40 really has no calling.

It hasn’t killed the album, it’s just changed the rules of the game for marketing “popular” music by reducing the power of radio and increasing interest in the long tail.

Streaming didn't kill the album, but something did.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/

Looks like piracy did it in.

I don't think focusing on album sales paints the full picture on how modern artists find success.

I've heard artists mention how albums don't really make them much money. Things like touring and merch sales account for the bulk of their income. I'd guess with streaming, podcasts, social networks, etc. artists have found ways outside of releasing a traditional album to stay relevant to the listener.

That was my point about killing the album. It’s no longer a particularly relevant milestone or attribute. The songs stand or fall in their own merit.

On the other hand, music has historically been a very social thing that have brought people together. The decline into a sollipsist "service" has been gradual since the dawn of recorded music, but Spotify et al are definitely making it worse than ever. My 11-year old daughter loves music but she and her friends all listen to different things, there is no music that they all know. I may have hated top40 stuff in my day, but at least we all knew it.

Don't worry, they still rally together around songs as they go "viral". Music has always had a big social component and always will. It's wired into us.

I'm not sure that's entirely bad. I met up with my cousin (nearly 20 years younger than me) and one of her first questions was "Show me your playlists! Music is how I get to know people." We spent ages talking about genres, recommending bands to each other, scrolling through each other's Spotify libraries and offline MP3s. I was thrilled that she was interested in a wide range of genres, across several decades. Far more diverse than when I was the same age. It's still social to be recommending music and trying to find new bands your friends will like.

As for knowing the same songs, I made friends through genre-related social groups - the goth/industrial nightclubs, and the Eurovision fanclubs / events. It's nice that generally everyone knows the same Max Martin songs, but there's deeper friendships to be had at clubs where everyone knows your obscure niche - whether it's arguing that Euphoria is still better than Heroes, even if Mans & Petra are the best hosts. Or if it's goths bitching over the shared experience of falling down the stairs trying to get onto the goth club dancefloor before Dero from Oomph yells "Gott Ist Ein Popstar" or "Augen Auf, ich komme"....

Damn that’s scary. A world where no one has anything in common. I’m in my 30s and my friends and I reference songs from our childhood all the time. Shows and candy and all sorts of things.

Remember the 90s? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pa6SGYWADU

E.D. Hirsch, Jr. wrote "Cultural Literacy" in 1987, with an update in 2002 as "The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy". It's a huge collection of thousands of words/phrases/concepts/devices/people/places/etc, across multiple categories, that most Americans will already know the majority of their meanings, or at least find them somewhat familiar. I personally like randomly looking at the proverbs and idioms and sometimes finding parallels in other languages. It'd be interesting to go through it at random with a 7th grader and see what they've picked up -- like who says "there's more than one way to skin a cat" these days, but also who grew up in the US and doesn't understand its meaning? The book contends that about 80% of the knowledge shared by the literate has not changed for over a hundred years. Meanwhile for the 20% that changes (or is brand new) Asimov once wrote a chapter (9 in http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/asimov-on-numbers...) on how so much once-common knowledge has been happily forgotten -- who needs to know about compound addition?

For the professional context, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a219064.pdf et al. claim you need to know 70k plus or minus 20k things in your field to be an effective expert. I think it's also why it can be easily rewarding to chat about work with colleagues, you both have a lot in common just on the basis of the shared profession.

In short, I wouldn't worry about running out of shared knowledge, nor even shared preferences and tastes, for yourself or for the world.

If you don't have anything in common with others then you're both mutually doing a really bad job of sharing your favorites with each other. I love getting musical recommendations from friends, and most of my very favorite music ever comes by way of friends, rather than me having "discovered" it "independently" (whatever that even means).

Interesting point. What helped you become friends with those people in the first place? For myself it's usually a common background or shared interest in something, which for example enables us to jokingly rank the best video games, which we are all familiar with from our childhood.

Honestly it's mostly about collocation, which studies have shown to be the most powerful factor in friendship formation. My best long-running friends that I'm still in regular contact with are all people that I met freshman/sophomore year of college because we lived on the same floor in the dorms. Now obviously most of the people on my floor I didn't make friends with, but I did make friends with the ones that I got along with. And yes there's some shared interests involved as part of that, but proximity was more important. I was in the CS major and I actually didn't make a lot of friends in the major at all; we didn't gel well for whatever reason and the classroom environment wasn't suitable for getting to know people. So my college friends ended up being a diversity of majors plus a lot of landscape architecture majors, because my most outgoing friend was in that major and he made a lot of friends in the major because of the nature of it (lots of time spent together in close quarters in the studio doing project work).

So I wouldn't say I've explicitly made many if any friends over shared interests in music, but then once I had friends for whatever other reasons, we shared a lot of music with each other. Hardly any of them weren't "in" to music, and indeed some of them quite the opposite; they ended up in a band together (and I would occasionally incompetently noodle along with them on vocals/bass/guitar, but I wasn't remotely good enough to play out like they were).

Ha thats a sweeping statement mate.....No one has anything in common?

In a way, that would just be a return to before the second industrial revolution, when popular music and consumer products were more more regionalised. "Everyone in the world, or even the country listens to the same thing and drinks the same cola" is a recent phenomenon, and arguably not that valuable a phenomenon.

In practice, though, I'm sure there's quite a bit of sharing musical tastes between friend and interest groups; it wouldn't be literally everyone listening to different things.

I would wonder does increasing consumer choice ultimately erode generational identity a bit, though. So much of the "what is a boomer/gen X/millenial" is founded in what popular culture everyone was consuming in a given decade.

I'm in the UK and in my 40s. For me the Top 40 used to be one of the few places where you could hear stuff that wasn't just pop radio - because in the UK it was a sales chart, not an airplay chart and genuinely represented what people were listening to, not what the pluggers and labels had successfully pushed.

However, since streaming, that equation has totally changed.

We have the same thing here with JJJ hottest one hundred. It is still mostly local underdogs so that is rad, but like you noted, the tides are changing thanks to streaming and every year gets a bit more mainstream.

What labels pushed on the radio did certainly feed into what people bought, though.

Yes - but the Chart Shows (both the BBC and the commercial stations) were the places where the stations were obliged to play songs, during the daytime, that weren't on their playlists.

Yup, exactly like democracy and "big government". It's not good, it's just the "common denominator".

Personally, I used to be able to listen to a large portion of the top 50 on Spotify without skipping too many. As of late last year, though, I've found that the top 10 are almost exclusively songs made popular on TikTok. I can't stand to listen to these songs, not because I necessarily dislike the songs (or TikTok for that matter), but because there are 15-30s sections of the song that I have heard dozens of times, posted on TikTok as a part of some new trend. As soon as I hear one of these parts, I instinctively skip, because I'm generally listening to Spotify to chill out, and hearing something that is so tightly associated with a social network really works against my "chill".

Back when I was in school, I really hated Billboard Top 10 for the same reason. Once I've overheard them so many times, often unpleasantly, the actual song became unlistenable, not because I dislike them.

With pop music you hear exactly the same track over and over with no variation and it gets predictable and monotonous. With classical, jazz, or live music there are many performances, so any two recordings will not sound identical. This is one reason I can't stand pop music after a few listens.

This is also why people love pop music. It is predictable, safe and unchallenging.

People also like it because it's colorful and multidimensional, but not so multidimensional that you can't decipher it without focusing on it exclusively and retreating to a quiet room.

However, there's high variance in the amount of layering and the overall richness of the songs.

I'm drawn to complexity in music and I can still enjoy pop... jpop specifically, as it tends to have more effort put into it.

reclines seat and listens to some µ's (Love Live) on his HD600.

There seems to be a neurological basis for it:

https://www.cracked.com/article_19426_5-things-you-do-every-...

Is music supposed to challenge you?

To each their own, but if i wanted to be challenged i read a book, learn something new, etc.

I think i listen to music because it has an effect of transfering emotional state/causes me to feel. Being intellectually challenging is not a good thing in that context. (Although i still want it to be unpredictable and not neccesarily safe)

> Is music supposed to challenge you?

Music can be whatever it wants. But music having complex melodies, varied lyrics, telling stories, and having social or political commentary has very much always been a thing. Plenty of that music still exists and is still being made, but it's not really found on modern pop stations (although older pop stations have slightly more complex work).

Just walking by a radio today bothers me. I can't deal with the ear sugar that's completely flat and features non-dynamic instrumentals from start to finish and lyrics that are all just some variation of "yeah yeah club dance club club club club party party club club love you dance dance drunk drunk club club don't love you now". And I'm not even "old" yet. I can't tell singers apart (particularly women) because they seem to be melding into some non-unique vocal style and every pop artist has the exact same instrumental backing.

Muzak has been used for decades to serve as non-distracting background noise. Simple instrumentals with no vocals or anything, used just to fill a void and assure people that they're alive and the business is probably operating. It's almost music, but not quite. Just budget ambiance. Now top 40 dance/pop hits are what play in elevators. Soulless, manufactured music, but now it's something with a manufactured persona stuck to it. Pop today has devoured muzak's market share and taken its role.

So if you listen to Bad Guy by Billie Eilish, Chun-Li by Nicki Minaj and thank u, next by Arianna Grande. You would say all of these women sound the same and have the same instrumentals?

My complaint would be less the instrumentals (it's formulaic but that doesn't make it bad) but the lyrics. Look up the lyrics to any of the songs you listed and read them. If you don't have the melody in your head they read awfully. They say nothing, make me feel nothing, and make me think of nothing. They don't resonate in any way. You could obviously look at someone like Bob Dylan as a counterpoint but even if you went to see some average local punk band you would find them singing words that say something and resonate with you. That's what I want from music. It's not right or wrong to like or dislike either of these approaches by the way. A lot of people want music to listen to in the background and that's easier to do when the lyrics are meaningless.

> They say nothing, make me feel nothing, and make me think of nothing.

That's because you're not their target market. The industry as a whole targets teenagers. It's been the same model since the '60s: turn teenagers into faithful consumers of acts (which are really just brands) and ensure they will buy for the rest of their life just to reminisce.

Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish speak to teenagers. All teenagers do is hormonal-driven love drama, so all pop music talks about is love drama. Every generation gets their teenager love drama painted in a slightly different way, to grant the illusion of differing from their parents, but that's it. Even the likes of Led Zeppelin or Bob Dylan, underneath it all, is just love drama; that generation was simply having their love drama tangled up with other stuff because of historical happenstance.

I take your point but I would argue you could remove 'me' from my statement and it would hold true. I think the pop stars mentioned make people 'feel' more through their social media and image than their music. Maybe I'm just an old man now but the lyrics to Bille Eilish's 'Bad Guy' surely can't resonate with anyone...

If you're so old it's probably time to learn that the things that resonate with other people don't necessarily resonate with you, and vice versa. And that's ok. It's cultural diversity. You may at some point "get it" and start to like Billie Eilish (I'm mostly indifferent). You may not. But believing that nobody possibly could is the mark of an incomplete theory of mind.

I can tell Nicki Minaj from them, but I can't tell Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, or Ariana Grande apart and they've been looping on the radio for years. I can point out a specific song that I've heard before and looked up who it was, but whenever a new song pops up, I can't tell them apart. They've completely merged into the same media personality with the same music.

To be fair, if I hear a new rock song with a lead male vocalist I'll also struggle mightily to identify them immediately. There are very few bands/singers with such unique styles that they can be told immediately apart. Same with any other genre really.

I think you need to be familiar with the songs' content in order to tell all these vocalists apart. If instead each of the top 5 male and female pop singers of today were to sing each others' songs, I challenge anyone to tell them apart.

And I don't think it's an artifact of being old. It's more about how much pop production homogenizes these voices into one "ISO Standard Voice." Back in the nineties, I couldn't tell all the various grunge singers apart without having pre-knowledge of the songs. If you had Sound Garden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Alice In Chains sing random songs, I wouldn't have been able to easily tell them apart either.

I don't think is a recent phenomenon though. Good luck distinguishing by voice alone the boy bands of the 90s, or the hair bands of the 80s, or the disco bands of the 70s, or the British invasion bands of the 60s either. And going back much further, can you really say you can distinguish the operatic and choral singers from each other either? I think it's always been the case that music has a particular sound that's in, and everyone is singing to that sound. There was no one singing in the grunge or mumble rap style a hundred years ago. It would have been unique and would've easily separated itself from the pack, but it simply wasn't even a thing that anyone was doing yet.

You can't tell Taylor Swift from Ariana Grande? I think this speaks more to the way you view pop music, than sonic similarities.

I was on onboard with plenty of pop music stars having a similar sound (90% of everything is crap, pop music included), but taylor swift does at least have a somewhat unique style.

Plenty of people can’t tell the difference between Bach and Beethoven, but that says more about them than it does about the artists.

> lyrics that are all just some variation of "yeah yeah club dance club club club club party party club club love you dance dance drunk drunk club club don't love you now".

Maybe you just don't like dance music? "Rock around the clock" or "Twist and Shout" had the same style of lyrics - simple, repetitive, rhythmic, accentuating the music rather than telling a story.

Couldn’t someone take what you just said and replace the word “music” with “book”, or “film”?

IMHO art (all the arts), art is like food.

There’s nothing wrong with ice cream, or McDonald’s sometimes. Not everyone has to be vegan.

Eat junk food all the time, though, and it’s unhealthy for you.

I think the same is true for music, film, the visual arts, literature, fashion, design, etc.

It’s your loss, IMHO. It’s like someone who doesn’t like to travel - it’s a big world out there.

Junk food is bad comparison, because listening to unchallenging music will not harm you at all. For that matter, the same goes with visual arts and fashion and design. There are movies and books that can actually harm you (when it teaches wrong history or facts for example, when violence is more then you can handle), but I would argue the cheap predictable popular ones are rarely those.

It is cheap argument to try to imply that unchallenging pop music somehow harms the listeners, but that argument does not have base in reality.

Being cognitively unchallenged by music or visual arts could be considered "harm". I know i do but anectada I guess.

The fact that you imply his argument is "cheap" or that you very quickly judge it as "bad comparison" with no more arguments than whatever you think could be interpreted as "his point exactly".

> Being cognitively unchallenged by music or visual arts could be considered "harm".

Is being cognitively unchallenged by something being harmed by that something in general? That is extraordinary claim that would require evidence. That is not standard we apply to other daily activities. And listening to music is not even activity, it is just something you put onto environment as you do something else.

If I go somewhere without listening to music, arguably getting even less challenging sounds into my ears, am I being harmed even more?

> I know i do but anectada I guess.

Do you have anecdote of someone being harmed by unchallenging music? Anectada require anecdote that confirms one case of it happening. I see only claim itself, but no anecdote.

> The fact that you imply his argument is "cheap" or that you very quickly judge it as "bad comparison" with no more arguments than whatever you think could be interpreted as "his point exactly".

Me thinking and saying that is comparison is bad and arguing by no harm is not proving "his point exactly". He did not wrote any arguments for why unchallenging music harms listener. He avoided need to put in such arguments by avoiding direct claim, opting for implication instead. It is common tactic when people want to appeal to emotions and instincts. It is also completely valid to answer it.

It is quite literally valid disagreement with quick judgement someone else made. Also, I did not implied his argument is cheap, I said it openly.

I think "lack of development/enrichment" might be a better term than harm. And "challenge" might not have been a great word-choice of mine, either. Depth? Craft? Some value.

For example, imagine a programmer/software engineer who never, ever, in their entire career, saw good code written by others?

Does that lack of good code (and there's lots of ways for code to be "good") harm their development as software devs?

I think to make a food comparison work, you need to set the reference point straight. Since your body (and your mind) doesn't require any music / movie / book to survive, the proper comparison is to food eaten on top of nutritional baseline - to all the extra things you eat above minimum survivable calories/nutrients.

This way, pop music can be correctly likened to McDonald's food: won't harm you at all, and it's one of the most pleasant things you can get with low effort. The "movies and books that can actually harm you" can be likened not to fast food, but to poisoned food. E.g. infected with E. coli because it wasn't prepared properly.

And another extra danger reveals itself: just like you can hurt yourself by overeating, you can hurt yourself by overconsuming entertainment.

The typical issue with McDonald's food put on top of other food is that it makes you fat and also unhealthy in the long term. As in, it is bad because it does some harm.

Otherwise there would not no issue with McDonald's food on top of regular food.

Yes, there are two problems.

First McDonalds wants customers to go to McDonalds so they make it taste good even if that means it is no longer healthy. (the entire food industry does this)

Second they try to get away with spending as little money on ingredients as possible which lowers the overall quality of the food.

The big question is how is cheap and low quality but addictive music harmful? It's not like people can overdose on music.

> Since your body (and your mind) doesn't require any music / movie / book to survive ...

I respectfully disagree : ). Name a single culture that has ever existed which had no art. No storytelling, pottery, visual crafts, music, dance, etc.

It might not have been art purely as its own thing as in today's Western art, it might have been art as part of religion ritual or tradition, but everyone everywhere has art.

Would you want to live in a world with zero music, and zero decorative arts, zero visual arts, zero stories, etc? Zero designed objects, zero rugs that have any sort of color or pattern, etc?

Art is totally necessary for our survival. It's so fundamental that we don't realize most of the time it's there.

Early example of fashion? The military, to distinguish soldiers and make people feel special about killing. Also, music (drums, etc) - to coordinate folks and lift their spirits. One example of how pervasive art is.

That's why the art/technology divide breaks down and why design is so interesting, imho. As soon as any material technology starts to get sophisticated, you start to get "aesthetics" and "styles". Think Russian vs U.S. engineering styles, for one example.

Creating tools is a creative act.

Plus, look at the cave paintings. Art's been around since day one. %;-)

Also if you only eat McDonalds it does indeed harm you, FYI :). Or, like, eating really unhealthy will harm you over time. Or eating ice cream all day : ).

"Unchallenging" isn't quite right for the food comparison, you're correct.

For instance I don't consider The Beatles, say, or Michael Jackson or Jay-Z or Frank Sinatra or Mozart necessarily "challenging" (for some people some of those artists are), but would consider them "healthy".

Healthy food can be tasty and delicious, too ; ).

I do think if someone listens only to music without any depth (again, I'm using the Beatles - or Led Zeppelin, or Jimi Hendrix, or Taylor Swift, or Robyn or Daft Punk, or Lauryn Hill, or Billie Holiday, or Kanye West as examples of popular artists with depth), it is a lost opportunity for development of the self, and in a sense, "stunts" the growth of one's own self.

It's also just a huge loss. There's so much beautiful art that is not "challenging", and much of the "challenging" work simply requires a friendly environment and an introduction, and they yield huge rewards.

At the same time I think the emotions which a lot of art can stimulate cause fear to a lot of people, which can be cause for avoidance of them, but that's a separate (albeit related) conversation : ).

I dunno. I did start off talking about "challenging" art. But, the line is so thin!

I don't think Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" would "challenge" many people - it's maybe the most popular jazz album, one of the best, and a beautiful piece of listening. It has lots of depth though, and his other work can be considered challenging, for sure ...

Really I guess I'm making an argument for the value of cultivation of the self through education, which includes the arts : ).

There's just so much out there: Indian classical music, Afrobeat, Latin jazz, country music, tons of electronic music from everywhere, traditional Chinese music, etc.

Not unlike programming/computer science, there's so much neat stuff that people have done in the arts that often people don't even realize exists.

Not all of us have the time and the inclination to do the deep digging, but, I think it's important to have a balance and at least an appreciation for the vastness of what exists in our lives, and that doing so enriches our selves.

I guess there are lots of types of "challenging". I suppose i was thinking of it in a technical sense - the way great classical music has really complex melodies and what not. I've always been impressed by the technical achievement of that sort of thing, but i mostly don't actually want to listen to it. The technical complexity is impressive but it doesn't aid what im trying to get out of music.

If we want to make metaphors to books - a very imperfect one might be a book written in old english or latin. It is very challenging, but its challenging (to me) for the wrong reasons. Some other people might relish that challenge, and that is great for them, but for me i want to be challenged by the story not the grammar.

Any form of art or hobby can be appreciated deeply or used for simple minded entertainment. You can enjoy everything at a surface level but going deeper requires commitment and you can't commit yourself to everything at once. Therefore saying something along the lines of "It’s your loss, IMHO." will be understood as disrespect of someones personal preferences and invites unnecessary hostility.

No disrespect intended.

Agreed, not all of us go deep on all things. I am biased towards being open to new experiences and continuing to learn and develop over the course of our lives, and do think it's good for people, and important, and that includes the arts.

I think part of the beauty of film (including TV), music, and literature (those three things in particular), is just how much really good stuff is easily accessible and easily available these days. Video games, too.

The real barrier is lack of familiarity and lack of that one person to introduce / guide you, in my heavily biased and optimistic opinion : ).

It's why the kids with the older siblings often knew about all the cool music ; ).

I have no trouble listening to pop music from the 80s, 90s and early 00s. I don't know if that's old age and nostalgia or if music was just better then. I think in many cases, music was just better in prior decades, pop music in particular.

I also think that's partly survivor bias. You listen to the best hits of those decades, tricking you into thinking that all music from those decades was like that. In reality, there was a lot of junk in those times too but we don't listen to it anymore. The same will happen with the 10s and the current 20s in twenty years.

With the virus, most of my exposure to foreign languages is due to YouTube these days. While the words for "heart" and "eyes" and various possessive pronouns are often among the first things I pick up on from the clips themselves, if I am curious enough to bother machine translating comments I often learn how to say "the kid's music is noise" just after "anyone listening in 2020?"

(For me, the best examples are all the 2000's videos with comments saying "remember when we had real music?")

And in the 80s, 90s and early 00s people were complaining that music was just better in prior decades.

Yeah but you know I think because we listen to less and less music on the radio and more on streaming, I think it's harder for break out hits to happen today. New music has to compete on equal footing with old music that is more accessible than it has ever been and also has to compete with podcasts and other forms of audio entertainment that are available in much higher quantities today.

The Beatles were the biggest pop act in history. They'd never crack the top-40 today.

You mean with their music and image from the 1960's? Of course not. Just like they wouldn't have dominated the charts in the 60's if the music and image had been in the style that had been fashionable and edgy in 1910.

Some of us find that a feature, not a bug. I don't want to hear something "new" and "different" each time, with each performance being different. I want the same song that I have listened to before. Songs have emotions and memories attached to them, and you will never get that from something unique each time unless it's truly catchy/pleasurable on the first listen, which is practically rare.

In a lot of TikTok songs, the 15-30 seconds of the song that you've heard dozens of times is the best part of the song, with the rest of the piece being rather dry and bland. "Hit or miss, I guess you never miss huh" and "I'm already Tracer" are my quintessential examples of this.

Is this the natural progression from 'albums are full of filler I just want the singles'? Now it's 'the single is full of filler I just want the chorus'?

It kind of hints that people nowadays only want the highest quality content which is ironic given the same content is used to soundtrack some of the lowest quality/most unoriginal content (e.g. 10 second clips of people doing the same dance to the same music).

> some of the lowest quality/most unoriginal content

The point of meme content (which is basically what these "same dance" videos are) is not originality; the point is taking part, belonging to the hivemind. Human beings fundamentally want to belong, not to be original.

I understand your point about taking part but what percentage of people take part vs. people who simply watch? It's not just the dance videos too. There's very little interesting content on TikTok in my opinion. It will certainly suck you in and have you watching mindlessly for hours a day but I think it's possible to do that and still be considered low quality and unoriginal.

> what percentage of people take part vs. people who simply watch?

I'd argue that the percentage has actually gone up pretty dramatically, when compared to the previous media (TV/cinema/theatre/music).

In reality, I would argue, more people than ever now make or take part in "something". Because 90% of everything is crap, though, the firehose is inevitably returning more crap than ever.

Do we need better consumption filters and better ways to emerge talent? Sure. Is this worse than before? I don't know, but it's definitely more democratic.

> It will certainly suck you in and have you watching mindlessly for hours a day

Not at all like TV, then. Oh wait

Well, the music is also the most unoriginal one, otherwise it wouldn't have enough mass appeal - so I would hesitate to call it "highest quality content"...

Songs are constructed that way nowadays; iirc Old Town Road or one of those were crafted in such a way that it's missing a hook at the end, and the hook is just over 30 seconds (or 1 minute) long, making people more likely to replay it for the hook and for the song to reach the threshold to be considered "played" on services like Spotify, artificially boosting their statistics / popularity. Can't find a source right away though, so take my claim with a grain of salt.

Wonder how tiktok is changing the way pop music is produced nowadays. I'm sure music producers are focusing more on that unique 10-15s catchy tune that is easy to market. This is definitely not good for the future of music.

This has been going on for years in commercials. Have you ever heard the full version of a song used in a Target or one of those drug commercials? Outside of the hook it's basically just a beat from a Casio keyboard.

Different observation, but I usually just listen to my playlist. I listened to Discover or whatever Spotify puts together and it was good for a bit, but then seemed to devolve into songs that YouTube personalities had made and posted on Spotify. It was really odd and sounded like it was made for edgy teens.

This article says that the Top 40 has dropped from 35mm to 30mm plays on a Wednesday. Then it says:

"The decline is likely partially the result of an overall decrease in streaming after Covid-19 hit the US, due to the absence of people listening to music on commutes and in stores. But it’s not just that. The biggest hits are declining, while the streaming of smaller hits remains about the same."

Seems like it could be "just that". This analysis is weird without knowing whether overall numbers have dropped and whether retail / gyms / public spaces primarily played Top 40 hits (which I'd guess is likely).

There’s also a different mix of music by listening scenario. I mostly listen to Top 40 and similar garbage while I’m commuting because I’m not that discerning. But the people who are true music aficionados are probably continuing to listen to their obscure music even when not commuting.

Not just scenario, but during crises, people tend to go for the familiar, so older tracks might have done relatively better than before. Spotify users might also be skewing a bit older than they used to as streaming adoption grows, but this is just a guess, and older users tent to use Apple Music.

According to the article, less popular songs are still being streamed about as much as they were before.

In other words its formulaic garbage people really don't care about, yet are too occupied to change it. When given the choice, they choose not.

I think that not all music is the same in that it won't be chosen in every context. Sometimes people just don't want to listen to music, they just want some background "noise" that will cover whatever background noise is present (like during a commute). I guess even the "formulaic garbage" is better than the traffic hum or the random noise on public transit.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing. When I drive (which I don't often do at all) I'll listen to whatever's on the radio, usually "zapping" around (like people do on TV) and ending up listening to some random music I would never chose on my own. That's usually whatever's popular at the moment. Do I like that music? Not really. But it sure beats the crap out of the rental car's noise engine.

Speak for yourself :) I can think of several songs where I would prefer the engine noise...

That's an interesting take, but I don't think the explanation could be so simple as "just that". It looks like the graph in the article showing the share of streams toward top songs has been trending downward long before COVID.

Yeah I agree. I anticipate some amount of people still discover music on the radio (even pop mega hits you have to hear the first time somewhere), then go seek it out on spotify.

I haven't much been in a car, thus haven't heard the radio, in 7 months. I have no idea what's on the top 40 right now.

WAP.

I got curious and listened to it, and after listening to that load of rubbish, I simply don't feel connected with society anymore. Do people actually listen to this and like it, or is it just the perceived shock value that counts?

WAP specifically feels like an experiment. A female singer's equivalent to the overtly sexual hiphop. In music, and in video.

Anecdotal: Friends have acknowledged that they're more disgusted by it than the male singer's counterparts. I admit I am, too. And this is regardless of the particular singer's ability to sing/rap, or the lack thereof.

Interesting. What makes it more disgusting?

Artistic merits aside, the (uncensored version of the) song and the music video seem justly regarded as a feminist redressing of the balance (if men can rap explicitly about being horny and wanting sex, so can women).

I recognise that, and thus acknowledge the importance of WAP, but I guess I'm more conditioned to expect this behaviour from men than from women? And the song makes me realise, and possibly correct for it, down the line.

Experiment? Little late for that. Nicki Minaj has been doing songs like this, better, for years

"Rock and roll" is an explicit reference to the sex act and "jazz" the usual male contribution to same. Mick Jagger couldn't "get no satisfaction", the Beatles asked "why don't we do it in the road", Nina Simone wanted "some sugar in my bowl", one-not-really-a-hit-wonder Hillary instructed listeners to "drop your pants around your ankles" (https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wu9Zps8vnEY), and then there's pretty much everything about Barry White.

WAP isn't the most nuanced contribution to this tradition, but it's hardly the first work exploiting the common-denominator. Its shock value largely lies in its novelty. In another 2-6 decades it will make the transition to familiar and then oldy. No predictions if it will be ranked with Simone, White, Jagger, the Beatles, or Hillary.

Not my cuppa, though I got off the pop train a few decades back.

Also folk music[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24130589

(peasants with little to no agricultural surplus aren't interested in freemartins, neither four- nor two-legged. Compare "we also have a ‘big’ cycle of generations" in https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they... )

I'm not intending to watch WAP until I must in order to understand a parody. There's certainly no shortage of other musical sublimation, such as the pin-up pastiche of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpuemnGD-44 .

Bonus clip (with gentlemen, it's "ladies first"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDcixye_0Jo

[1] is there any popular genre that lacks in innuendo? Those highly-censored soviets produced https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tDZl_wj8Fo , which raises a pose estimation question: how could the eponymous girl's tears possibly fall directly on such long spears? Was she standing on a ladder?

Even the Taliban, I believe, allow arguably amorous lyrics, as long as (a) they're not accompanied by instrumentals, and (b) the surface meaning of "beloved" is the divine.

The theme goes way back:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song%20of%20Sol...

(By no means the earliest.)

Hmm...

    Do not gaze at me because I am dark,
    because the sun has looked upon me.
    My mother's sons were angry with me;
    they made me keeper of the vineyards,

suggests another layer to:

    Там смуглянка-молдаванка
    Собирала виноград.

    there's a dark-skinned moldavian girl
    harvesting the grapes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSc3fVBjYks

(The violinist's earrings don't contradict my white/red theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382154 )

Those Russian/Soviet clips were all wonderful, thanks. Also just plain good pop songs.

Oh, I don't have a problem with explicit lyrics and am perfectly well aware of sex' and love's statuses as the most common tropes in lyrics. It's just that this particular "song" is so horribly bad that I simply can't understand how anyone could endure it.

I will admit that even "Drop your pants" has some playful redemption which evokes a smile that I've yet to appreciate in WAP.

But musically, "Drop" is pretty pants.

I don't like the song much. It feels, as a straight guy, like a record label is manipulating me - using my sexuality as lever to increase their stream count.

On the other hand - it's just bawdiness. Humorous role play. It's not as if it's a new invention

> like a record label is manipulating me - using my sexuality as lever to increase their stream count.

You mean the same way James Bond movies are "manipulating" you to buy tickets?

Did you know the original version of "Tutti Frutti" (Little Richard, 1955) was about anal sex? ("If it don't fit, don't force it / You can grease it, make it easy")

If you are appalled by that, fair enough. It is not something particularly new though. Of course people at the time also saw Rock'n'roll as bringing the end of civilized society.

The furor caused by WAP is pretty hilarious to see.

People have been making sexual references in song lyrics since the dawn of time, and that's perfectly fine.

As mentioned in a sibling comment, it's not the explicit lyrics but the extremely low quality of the entire production that puts me off.

If so, can you articulate how it is "extremely low quality" compared to others songs in the same genre?

Too much profanities stuffed in, to such an extent that the desire to provoke takes up any space that could have been used for some kind of artistic expression. Or something. The track is simply a waste of time.

I think it's an insightful look at today's society, and I'm fond of it. It's a result of the ongoing sex pride and positivity movement in the US.

Anecdotally, recent generations have been raised with sexual repression and frustration. The most obvious example is announcing yourself as gay and being very literally banished from your family household, but it is layered quite deeply -- I can go into detail, but in general, sex continues to be an unspoken and embarrassing topic that you figure out yourself in private.

Since these urges are natural and part of the human experience, the whole treatment is odd and is often seen as uncaring. If you experience it, it puts you in an odd place: The repression forces you to either build a fiercely negative connection with sex, or develop a positive connection while having a struggled and inauthentic relationship with your family.

There is a growingly open sentiment that it is healthy and natural to want to have sex, and to have it safely, and perhaps with multiple partners over the course of your life if it suits you, and perhaps with multiple partners at the same time if that suits you too, and to tell all your friends about what a great (or awful) time you had afterward.

The novelty and "shock value" of this song, if you will, is being able to discuss these topics without consequence. And it reinforces something that is newly ingrained in society: To be more open and encouraging of safe sex for all is aligned with an active social movement that is making a difference to a lot of people, one that brings us closer to inner desires previously repressed.

This song is especially fun for a few reasons but putting the silly absurdist humor aside, I see people get hooked because it strikes this social chord really hard, demonstrating this generation's cultural shift in a comically honest way. A progressive household has both partners happily and willfully cooking and cleaning regularly, so to be a more desirable partner there's pressure to offer something else extraordinary -- "I don't cook, I don't clean, but let me tell you how I got this ring".

On a meta level, it's a comfortable beat for the bedroom and it sets a mood that is more primal. On another meta level, there's also a novelty that this song could only get to this level of popularity right now, realistically. It's not a song you can play on the radio or in stores.

> I haven't much been in a car, thus haven't heard the radio, in 7 months.

What's the connection between being in a car and listening to the radio?

Do people not generally have radios in their homes where you live? And you must have a phone or laptop to be typing this where you could listen to the radio!

The connection is, most people I know would listen to the radio in a car?

Not saying there's not other ways to consume. but as an anecdote myself or my partner never listen to radio anywhere but in my car either, it's pretty common I believe!

Being in a car with spotty mobile connection which prevents people from using Spotify is apparently the biggest niche left for radio...

Radio just works. Someone else is choosing the playlist and you kinda hear the music in between the ads and annoying hosts.

At home, I can select what I want to hear. I don't need to keep my attention on the road.

Do you not have radio stations where you value how the host selects, curates, and gives the background to the music for you?

What about the current affairs, plays, comedy, history?

I can’t imagine going without the radio!

That's understandable because you have BBC Radio. Not every country has access to such high quality.

Yes, but their shows are on at 2200-2300 on thursdays or something. The people who are active during the times I'm in my car are the morning jockeys who cater to the lowest common denominator.

I'm commuting at not-even-close-to-that-time. Can't get their shows even as podcasts, because the music rights would cost an arm and a leg.

No, not really in America. There are a few freeform music stations that still have actual DJs in the booth selecting records that they like, but mostly al the FM broadcast stations here are owned by 1 or 2 advertising companies who play preselected songs, have canned DJ banter, and a very low music-to-ad ratio.

Isn't A Prairie Home Companion a massive thing in the US?

They started dying out heavily over a decade ago. The best remaining stations are the local NPR stations, then there's the cesspool of talk radio stations, and there are some local gems like WFMU here in NYC which I stream online.

> Do people not generally have radios in their homes where you live?

No.

> And you must have a phone or laptop to be typing this where you could listen to the radio!

Do I need an RTL-SDR?

No I mean every radio station I know streams over the Internet as well.

Why would I choose listen to the radio with ads when I can listen to music without ads instead?

Not all radio has adverts though.

The radio model is heavily influence by cars listener. Sometimes marketing tools are just not able to track if customers left or just moved to another category.

I'm in the US, and no, younger people do not generally have standalone radios anymore. Music listening happens on digital devices these days, primarily via streaming (whether it be YouTube or Spotify).

This would be great. The idea of “best ranked music” results in mediocre, bland music that’s mostly ranked based on the social connections of the artist. Musical culture and genres are extremely diverse and trying to rank individual pieces of music makes discovery harder.

I doubt they’ll actually do this of course. Their monetization model relies on ranking.

Based on the songs being aggresively pushed by record labels, it seems that the ultimate goals of mainstream music industry are:

- To glorify violence, substance abuse, disrespect of women, domination behavior, anti-intellectualism.

- To reinforce racial stereotypes, including fear of minorities.

- To make people superficial.

Songs are an effective way to deliver a message to be repeated over and over and over again until people break and assimilate the message.

The themes you mentioned are being pushed by more than just the corporate music industry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkES4anCYOw

> "It's all hip hop's fault, you see. Not the three companies who decide what you hear and see."

nice timing at 1:47, or decent 'shop skillz?

I don't think you can say this in general. There are a lot of uplifting chart songs. On the point of substance abuse, yes, that's a topic. But in reality, young people just tend to talk about this and it's really hard to say what's cause and effect.

And I really can't see your points about superficiality, racial stereotypes etc. That niche surely exists, but it's far too hot for the big labels.

Lastly, on anti-intellectualism: Yes, those songs tend to not be too intellectually challenging, but I don't think that's bad. People tend to listen to those when partying or just relaxing ; it's okay to simply chill out sometimes. Most people don't want to read technical literature for coming down either and that's fine.

>it seems that the ultimate goals of mainstream music industry are: [...] Songs are an effective way to deliver a message to be repeated over and over and over again until people break and assimilate the message.

It sounds like you're saying that the music industry is engaged in a conspiracy to change people's behavior. Is this a correct characterization? If so, is there any evidence for this conspiracy, or some plausible motivations? I'm not sure how the powers that be would benefit from people being more violent abuse drugs, or disrespect women, for instance.

Many conspiracies can be just explained through emergent behavior. For example, there could be demand for that music, and the labels are just creating content to respond to that demand... without any ethical considerations about what they're promoting, that is.

But to be honest, a conspiracy of some kind could be an explanation, who knows.

For some people, there are substantial tangible, material benefits to dumbing down society.

For example, the "gangster rapper" stereotype is pushed aggresively by the music industry. The popularity of "gangster rap" results in "gangster" aesthetics becoming fashionable, even among law abiding people who are not gangsters. However, when people see a person that resembles the "gangster" stereotype (purely based on their attire) pushed by the entertainment industry, they will be more likely to call 911, eventually resulting in an innocent person being killed for no valid reason. Is this a racist conspiracy? who knows.

Likewise, oversexualization results in people having unplanned kids, causing them to ultimately become poor, and more susceptible to predatory loans, low wages, political manipulation and all the machinery that exists only to abuse the poor. Similar to anti-intellectualism.

And then, glorification of violence, competition, non-compliance, etc... this just makes people very divisive, and in order to dominate a large population you want them to be as divided as possible, and constantly distracted with immaterial disputes while you lobby the government.

So, yeah... it could be a conspiracy. It is very profitable to make people vulnerable and susceptible to manipulation and abuse. Especially political manipulation, which is already prominent in American journalism.

It kind of resembles the psychological warfare techniques used by the Soviets (i.e.: ideological subversion). https://youtu.be/IQPsKvG6WMI?t=60

> conspiracy of some kind could be an explanation, who knows

Actually we do know. It’s safe to say that conspiracies involving a lot of actors are mathematically impossible.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Snowden’s leaks were about a conspiracy that involved many more than a 1000 people and it lasted for years. You get reports about one government program or another that’s been kept secret for decades. These are conspiracies.

Statistically improbable is different from mathematically impossible. It’s also much less improbable when the people involved have to join through rituals like government classification designations.

Again, government programs regularly involve much more than a 1000 people and are known to be kept secret for decades. These programs are clearly conspiracies.

Not sure of what conspiracies you’re thinking of, but if actual evidence was leaked, then we are talking about a clear failure of those involved, therefore this is evidence for the claim that large scale conspiracies are indeed impossible ;-)

You can believe what you want of course, but from my POV when the discussion ends up in non-falsifiability land, you might as well talk about the existence of God or Santa Claus, an interesting discussion for sure, but not one that can yield any useful insight.

If it is possible for a significant period of time, then it is possible. Saying something is impossible because it "only" lasted for 50 years is stupid.

Organized religion involves millions of people and is still alive and well.

Can this model be used to accurately predict real data? How reproducible is this research?

In case anyone is paying attention to this conspiracy theory garbage, I suggest you look at the actual history of particular genres of popular music, especially of black origin, and how it was routinely suppressed. I only found out recently that Daddy Yankee (you may have heard of Despacito) had a lot of trouble with reggaeton being banned early on: https://nacla.org/news/reggaeton-nation

I wouldn't say the music industry is out to do anything but make money - however - 'shocking' makes more money.

'WAP' - was designed to break through the noise by being crude and shocking - a title that I literally cannot write :), and almost on cue, had a 'GOP Congressman' talking about the 'Godlessness' of it all, playing perfectly into the hands of the labels. Like comedy.

But it's a horrible song, because it's not meant to be one - it's more of a 'audio meme' meant to accompany the visuals media stars who made it. The press was more than happy to glom onto it for social reasons.

This is pretty toxic to music and 'driven' by the labels, though not specifically for any purpose other than making money.

MTV however - has always had a 'social change agenda' as part of their ethos.

Most of the best music is accompanied by something 'new' and possibly a little bit rebellious, but generally not 'shocking'. It seems every big artists curates an image, but usually it did not overshadow the music.

Since social media however, I'm not so sure. LadyGaga, however talented, seems to have always been 'visual first'.

The top 40, while always mostly crap, did have a lot of gems, it was guarded by people with 1/2 decent taste in music and there were always indies.

Now there's much, much more noise.

The music industry has never hidden that they manipulate listeners into consuming more and more media, so it's pretty much the opposite of a conspiracy.

It's like saying the ad industry is conspiring to manipulate us into buying their clients' products and services.

I don’t think conspiracies have to be secret.

Yes, they do. Like, that's literally the definition of "conspiracy".

noun a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. "a conspiracy to destroy the government"

Precisely! "Conspiracy" requires a secretive element, whereas the media conglomerates are quite open with their goals to make everyone consume more media in order for them to make more money.

Conspiracy may be a little strong, but if you look at talk radio it’s pretty obvious that a formula was discovered that maximizes roi for the segment.

Music isn’t much different, there are just more variants. The goal is engagement, not social outcomes. Think YouTube recommendations, but slower motion.

The ultimate goal of the main stream music industry is to make money. Those are just what they've found to be the most effective ways to do it.

The labels will have some method to game the system - whether they own banks of devices playing the song/album they are pushing, or through a 3rd party service.

There will be services in Asia that offer to do Spotify plays, and it's likely to be cheaper than TV/Radio advertising or buying physical copies to get an initial high ranking.

Blandness is a feature for my family. We have wildly different tastes, and it’s hard to come with a consensus on what to listen in the car. The top 40/50 has a high chance of being “fine” for everybody.

That’s what I would put in the background if I had to make random people wait in a room for an hour.

There are “discovery” playlist outside of the ranked ones, so I wouldn’t be surprised if my use is not so far from their intended purpose.

This concept allowed Nickelback to make it into arenas and stadia. Their music is the dry toast of rock, no one loves it but it is the lowest common denominator for "rock".

"In a seminal 2004 essay in Wired titled "The Long Tail," journalist Chris Anderson argued that digital culture would help niche music, books, and movies thrive. With fewer gatekeepers and more avenues to find likeminded fans, people would be more likely to indulge their true interests, rather than just accept what was offered by the mainstream."

Nice idea, there is some truth to it based on what we've seen so far, but we can also see how the corporations that control "what was offered by the mainstream" are now controlling (financing) the gatekeepers of the web and/or personal computing device (for lack of a better term). The new gatekeepers have become entrenched thanks to centralisation, lock-in and using the system itself as the world's most powerful hype machine, or "network effects".

The entertainment industry has gatekeepers, so too does the web (perhaps even the wider internet) and the personal computing device.

If and when things get tight for the gatekeeper business, they (web gatekeepers) will also control the so-called "long tail". What we are seeing is that it is not the "gatekeeperless" distribution channel many might imagine, as YouTube deletes a seemingly non-commercial video and arguments ensue over rights to "free speech".

The tentacles of these gatekeepers keep reaching out further. No "long tail" seems to be safe from their influence and ultimately their control.

Doesn't the article indicate...the long tail might be true?

somewhat but the decline seems relatively small. My intuition is that the dynamics of digital content lower the barrier for new talent to go very quickly to the top, think Billie Eilish and her brother producing an album out of their bedroom, but that the centralisation still means most eyeballs go to the top, maybe that part even got worse given how monotonous viral spread is.

I don't think there is much indication that there is a broad shift from the top to the middle. Other mediums like Youtube and Twitch almost exclusively concentrate attention at the top as well, with IIRC two thirds of streamers not even having any viewers.

For income? Oh hell no.

The long tail of artists that makes the platform more long-tail money with minimal cost is comparatively safe.

Especially given that artists/labels do the grunt work of loading everything to the electronic platform and even for them the cost of production and distribution is markedly decreased from several decades ago.

Even users do the grunt work for them, by discovering and listening to new artists, adding them to playlists and giving them extra data for their algorithms.

I'd disagree in music. Many of the industry's top musicians started lo-fi in their room or basement, like Lorde or Billie Eilish, or all the garage rock, punk rock, hip hop, etc. Those artists get propelled by mass media, but they were nobodies and had basic equipment. So even in the Poppiest of genres, you have breakout by unheard of people. Then, expanding to folk or jazz or electronic, Spotify allows a measly income and exposure for very obscure, niche players and their small record companies. Power has been widely distributed by Napster, Spotify, and many others. They barely gatekeep these obscure artists, they use algorithms, though they do not share a decent % of profits with artists, IMO.

Big difference between Napster and Spotify.

No gatekeepers with P2P. It is like two friends lending each other LPs, tapes, or CDs. That is how "long tail" music used to spread, pre-Internet

> While blockbuster movies are only growing in importance...

Obviously, there have been no real blockbusters released this year. I don’t have evidence, but for me it seems like indie movies are thriving. The Streamers are all pouring money into original movies—I can’t think of a single movie that Netflix, Prime, or Hulu has produced that was a sequel.

You need to create originals before you can cash in on sequels. Or buy them eg. Disney buying Marvel for $4b and making $18 billion 10 years later from the IP.

Off the top of my head a Netflix original Christmas movie has had two sequels.

Oh, yes there were some teen romcoms that had sequels (eg. Kissing Booth 2). I’m not exactly the target audience for those.

That christmas stuff was 100% algorithm driven stuff.

They analysed that christmas movies sell and pumped out a bunch for 2-3 years straight now. None of them are especially good or bad, it's a way to spend 1-2 hours while eating christmas candy.

Speaking of blockbuster sequels. Look at these crazy dollar amounts, especially the Avengers franchise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_super...

The new Pee Wee movie. Death Note was a remake. They made a movie as a sequel to Breaking Bad. They also pick up many series that were canceled elsewhere, like Arrested Development. The Sandler movies are technically original, though at this point his stuff is as much a franchise as Madea.

But, yeah, they do pick up a lot of original and niche stuff too. They're the only reason the romantic comedy is still a thing, for instance.

Netflix did a pretty bad job with Death Note.

Willam Dafoe was a good cast, but the same cannot be said of the rest.

I am dreading the release of Netflix' s "The Last Airbender". All indications are that it will be much more worse than that awful movie version.

Yea, the creators of the original left because of "artistic differences".

Not holding my breath for this one...

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/14/entertainment/avatar-airb...

It's almost like there's some force of nature making animated-to-live adaptations terrible. There are a few exceptions, though.

I think Netflix did kind of OK on Erased (僕だけがいない街). The first movie that was made from that great source material was excruciatingly bad.

>It's almost like there's some force of nature making animated-to-live adaptations terrible.

I enjoyed 2015 TV version of Death Note. I mean, it was quite cheesy and deviated from the source material, but I still had fun watching it.

The whole animation to live adaptation idea is equivilant to remaking the original with a new cast, bigger budget, and shorter run time if you're going TV series -> film.

Hollywood studios have certain expectations about pacing and storyline.

The writter and director will either have their own ideas about the story, or they will be cashing a paycheck and not care.

Basically it's a bad start creatively. You're almost certain to lose what made the original special.

Really fans shouldn't get exicted about them. The best case is that you get something good but very different.

It's not just Hollywood, though. Japan especially is great at butchering live adaptations.

Streaming has also focused a lot on serial content. Lots of those titles have had multiple seasons. One season is easily 3-4 features worth of content. The feature is not the end-all it used to be.

Yup, the main statistic with streaming services is long-term engagement; a film is just an hour and a half, a series is 10 hours stretched out over either one day or a few months, depending on the viewer. What's important for Netflix is that they keep their subscribers.

I think this is also why they're lenient with sharing accounts; people are less likely to cancel their subscription when someone else may still be using it.

A lot more stuff on Netflix, but a complete dirth of creativity in Theaters. No more rom-coms, woody allen type things.

The budgets are now huge, and globally focused, and the 'lowest common denominator' of the world audience is very low. Stories have to be able to work across cultures.

So you get things like 'Transformers' which don't even have a plot. Just big, long, action sequences. Hardly any dialogue. Works well for the plebes in the US - but also Qatar, Lebanon, Malaysia, China, France, Brazil etc..

This is a little bit off topic, but I read this interesting article how it's possible to do money laundering through Spotify with the help of streaming farms: https://ppcprotect.com/spotify-streaming-farms/

This seems to be a bigger issue than I thought - this article quotes up to $300 million as damage: https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/how-to-fight-spoti...

Spotify has definitely changed how I listen to music over the years. I have my core segments, but I'd say that 33% of my time on Spotify is just stuff that I bump into for random of reasons: a music beef between artists I don't listen to, stories from friends with different tastes in music, a news article about a band in the 50s, etc.

I find myself listening to the music to give context to the stories I bump into. And then I just sort of get lost in it for a bit like you would reading random stuff on Wikipedia. Wrecks havoc on my music suggestions though.

I'm similar, I spend a lot more time discovering and exploring than I do listening tonold favourites. Which is saying a lot, because I used to DJ House and DnB for a community online radio station.

Isn't soundcloud better for house?

Yeah lots of better places than Spotify. I only listen to house when I am mixing or listening to a friends set these days so it has to be from my own collection or theirs. It's all the other genres I listen to that are on Spotify.

>Wrecks havoc on my music suggestions though

Netflix and spotify have definitely not solved suggestions yet. I still struggle to get either service to get me what I want.

With Netflix, their catalogue is small enough that I can find what I want regardless of what they suggest. They seem to have nailed the "more of the same" algorithm which is mostly looking at their weird notion of genre. For me that means it recommends me stuff I've already decided that I'm not interested in watching because they've been recommending it for months and I've declined to watch it. This seems in general a problem with recommendation algorithms: they struggle picking up on negative signals and get stuck in t a perpetual more of the same shit loop.

Spotify recommendations vary depending on the context. Their profile of me is probably very confused because I listen to a lot of different things and what I listen to is mostly dependent on context and what I'm in the mood for, which spans 5 decades of music and quite a few genres. I gravitate to a lot of alternative stuff but only the good stuff (for my personal very narrow definition of good). Spotify never figured out that sweet spot. So, I've been ignoring their radio feature because I find it a mix of "I already have that in a play list" or "I hate that song, which is why I don't have it in a playlist". It only very occasionally suggests something I haven't heard that I actually like.

However, I love their "users that listen to X also listen to Y" section. For me that's a main tool to discover new things. They also suggest adding songs to playlists. I've rediscovered a few tunes from the eighties that were somehow stuck in my head but that I struggled to name this way. The eighties were of course the glory days of the top 40 and I listened to it while doing my homework back in the day. I stopped listening to that stuff in the nineties when alternative music became a thing.

In any case, I prefer these non personalized type of suggestions over the more of the same stuff that passes for artificial intelligence peddled by many websites. I hate how you get stuck in recommendation bubbles that way. This also dominates news websites these days, which is something I hate because it's gotten quite hard to get an overview of what is happening in the world with news websites increasingly biased by what works as click bait with shoddy AI algorithms rather than telling me what is happening.

And it's a reason I like HN because here the feed is dictated by shared interest of a technical audience rather than any of our personal preferences or political opinions. That's why it works. No AI recommendations here. That's why people come here.

>With Netflix, their catalogue is small enough that I can find what I want regardless of what they suggest.

How is that even possible? They barely have anything!

> Their profile of me is probably very confused because I listen to a lot of different things and what I listen to is mostly dependent on context and what I'm in the mood for, which spans 5 decades of music and quite a few genres.

This is not unique. Probably most people are like this.

If you add shared devices like Alexa into the mix then it's even more all over the place.

> How is that even possible? They barely have anything!

For people like myself or my partner, this is kind of a perk. People who want Disney-style stuff have multiple platforms for it and those still exist, but the long-tail of Netflix can be great to dive into. My social bubble has gotten quite into the variety of Korean drama, including a few who'd never (normally) watch a subtitled show.

I've tried switching to Apple Music for a little while to try and change things up, but they don't seem to have the generated playlists, recommendations and networks that Spotify seems to have. I switched back within a week or two.

I do sometimes miss my 'old' collection of music (it's still in itunes), but pretty much everything in there is found in Spotify as well (exceptions being things like early demos the artists themselves aren't proud of).

Honestly I've never met a person who listens to Spotify's top/trending playlists - they are notoriously awful random mess (like all top hit charts)

Spotify is definitely killing top lists but not on purpose - turns out arbitrary top lists are an awful idea once we have free access to music and a strong communities that can curate the music properly. It'll continue to decline as people are learning how to control their playlists better.

I just ran across a three year old pop song on YouTube today with 200+ million views. I've never heard it on the radio. The top 40 gatekeepers are killing the top 40.

Why does it matter? Top 40 only really had relevancy to what journalists talk about, music journalists are not really relevant because the idea of having to go to town to a store to buy music is no longer a thing when you can just listen to any music instantly and make your own mind up quicker than you can read a review.

Think they're getting annoyed at modern way of consuming music affecting an antiquated meaningless chart that had already been made irrelevant by the very way music listening had changed.

I once audited the playlist of local radio stations. I recorded a few months worth of data and asked, for each day, week, and the full time period, what # of songs constituted 50% of overall song playtime. In all commercial formats in my market, the number was under 75, and in most under 50. I find Spotify pretty crummy at surfacing new music, but it's a lot better than the same 30-50 songs being played again and again and again and again.

Spotify is actually pretty good at surfacing new music when compared to radio stations. As a music lover I never had it this good. If you just rely on Discover Weekly it offers you more new songs than you could ever discover by listening radio and if you're a little more proactive, you can discover new music in myriad ways.

I’ve personally been listening to more calming music, classical and “study beats” and haven’t felt cultural pressure to check anything out recently ( besides wap ). It’s kind of a relief to have less cultural moments for me

I guess it’s reasonable to worry that Spotify is creating a sort of algorithmic filter bubble where it just delivers you more of what you want…but man, the Discovery Weekly feature just works. I have, weekly, discovered a lot of artists I would never have heard of.

Am I finding as wide of a range of music as I would have when I worked at a college radio station? Probably not. Have I discovered more and better music than whatever was on the radio in Peoria growing up? You betcha.

It must be an algorithm change in the spotify recommendation engine.

Either because the top50 playlist overstated the correlation between "liking Drake" and "liking Taylor Swift", or because they found that by trying to broaden the spectrum of what people listen to, they get people to listen to more music, and they get less-than-top50 artists happier.

Spotify makes me miss Rdio. The Rdio algorithm for finding new music based on an artist, song, or album was really fantastic while Spotify just gives me a playlist of similar songs in the same genre as my “radio”.

I know Pandora incorporated some of Rdio’s technique but its UI leaves a lot to be desired.

Spotify did this for a while, but the more advanced recommendation algorithm got axed after the acquisition and now it just plays songs from similar artists.

I really wish Spotify brought back that deeper music analysis because I'm the type of listener who will like one or two songs from an artist while not being a fan of the artist's general style of their more well-known work. Thus, Spotify's current recommendation algorithm is incredibly hit or miss for me.

I think it's interesting that there's some periodicity in the graph showing the "Share of US Spotify top 200 streams going to top 40 songs" where the share spikes during each summer. I have no substantive conclusions about this, just thought it was worth pointing out.

The NYTimes Popcast podcast recently[0] took up a form of this question while examining the relevance of album sales and Billboard charts as a whole. I highly recommend the episode, as well as the podcast generally.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/22/arts/music/popcast-mercha...

"killing" might be an extreme way of putting it, but it's definitely showing that the older models to determine music popularity are outdated (billboard, top 40 radio)

see also Post Malone Shatters 54 Year Old Beatles Record: https://kiss108.iheart.com/content/2018-05-09-post-malone-sh...

Spotify's statistics are super misleading, and they will continue to be misleading until they make all "listens" from each account equal in value.

That would be a good thing, honestly. I mean...look at rotten tomatoes, lots of times critics have no idea what they're talking about

Oh is it? Good

Top 40 are only relevant to music executives that make their living pumping up the worse kinds of musical garbage to people that base their musical tastes into what "other people" (payola, it's payola) like.

And it seems that, as the internet came and the music distribution became more long-tailed, the worse the "top 40" became.

Who would've thought that retail outlets and other public places had such a large impact on how the TOP40 is shaped.

I prefer stores like Bandcamp.

"Killing"... What a sensationalist title with an article isn't even indicating " death". Why do you put up with subpar clickbait like this?

I haven't started streaming my music yet but if it leads to a greater diversity of tastes in listeners then I'm all for it.

I can only hope..

Spotify is really the true top 40. Because there are direct statistics about what is most played and shared..

Spotify suffers from fake listeners, so it's not the true top 40 either.

https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/fake-artists-have-...

It's even better for smaller countries. Denmark has a best selling music list, published by the record industry, which is often used as the basis for TOP XX playlists on the radio.

That seems reasonable, until you realize that it's actually within the reach of a dedicated individual on a normal salary to affect the list. The best selling album have in some weeks sold in the low hundreds.

Good! Top 40 -- and why 40 instead of 50, or 100? -- is useless pop nonsense for bland radio stations.

Has Zipf’s Law ever applied to the distribution of music consumption?

When shaped by industry, algorithm, or serendipity?

Yes, strongly.

The influence of hitmakers and gatekeepers adjusts what makes the curve, and shifts it somewhat, but the overal outlines of any informational domain will be governed by Zipf.

I thought so.....but it's always good to hear validated or contrarian thought on the topic.

Maybe I'm just in a self-created confirmation bias loop or force fitting, but I'm noticing what appears to be Zipf's Law all around me since I've become aware of it.

The top-40 is killing me, so it only seems fair.

The pop music industry has seen at least three disruptions to its controlling gatekeepers since the 1950s (1956-60, ~2000 with Napster, and presently with Spotify and YouTube), but each time a dominant hegenomy re-emerges. I doubt this time will be different, though the brief renaissance will doubtless be appreciated.

Charles Perrow wrote of this in the mid-1980s:

After the critical period from about 1956 to 1960, when tastes were unfrozen, competition was intense, and demand soared, consolidation appeared. The number of firms stabilized at about forty. New corporate entries appeared, such as MGM and Warner Brothers, sensing, one supposes, the opportunity that vastly expanding sales indicated. Some independents grew large. The eight-firm concentration ratio also stabilized (though not yet the four-firm ratio). The market became sluggish, however, as the early stars died, were forced into retirement because of legal problems, or in the notable case of Elvis Presley, were drafted by an impinging environment. Near the end of this period the majors decided that the new sounds were not a fad and began to buy up the contracts of established artists and successfully picked and promoted new ones, notably The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan. A new generation (e.g., The Beatles) appeared from 1964 to 1969, and sales again soared.

But now the concentration ratios soared also. From 1962 to 1973, the four-firm ratio went from 25 to 51 percent; the eight-firm ratio from 46 to 81 percent, almost back to the pre-1955 levels. The number of different firms having hits declined from forty-six to only sixteen. Six of the eight giants were diversified conglomerates, some of which led in the earlier period; one was a new independent, the other a product of of mergers.

How did they do it? The major companies asserted “increasing central control over the creative process”[352] through deliberate creation and extensive promotion of new groups, long-range contracts for groups, and reduced autonomy for producers. In addition, legal and illegal promotion costs (drug payola to disc jockeys, for example) rose in the competitive race and now exceeded the resources of small independents. Finally, the majors “have also moved to regain a controlling position in record distribution by buying chains of retail stores.”[353] The diversity is still greater than it had been in the past, and may remain high, but it is ominous that the majors have all the segments covered. As an executive said, “Columbia Records will have a major entry into whatever new area is broached by the vagaries of public tastes.” But for a concentrated industry, the “vagaries of public tastes” are not economical; it is preferable to stabilize and consolidate them. This would be possible through further control over the creative process and marketing.

Charles Perrow, Complex organizations : a critical essay, 1972, 1985. pp. 186--187.

The dynamics, actors, and economics remind me strongly of the software / high-tech industry, though with much weaker coupling and different lock-in mechanics.

Perfect

Betteridge's law of Hacker News headlines

No (Betteridge's law)

Damn. That's one grave I would dance on so hard I'd probably twist an ankle or something.

Ha, fun. TIL. From http://betteridgeslaw.com (which is apparently crawling some sites daily). My favorite so far is "Was Professor Snape secretely a trans Woman?" LOL.

There's a lot of data in the article. I don't think this is a very thoughtful rebuttal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com